Here's looking at you, grid

It is in the modern era that this book loses its lapidary elegance

In a 1924 editorial headlined “A Familiar Form of Madness,”New York Times  expressed its disdain for that vulgar new entertainment, that lowly diversion for idle minds, that pointless display of erudition known as the “cross-word”: “Scarcely recovered from the form of temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mahjong sets, about the same persons now are committing the same sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letter of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex.” A year later, this Olympian condescension had gotten a little desperate: “The craze evidently